Developing A Digital Marketing Plan For An Oil And Gas Company

Identifying Business Issues

There has been a decline in the production of oil and gas because of high industry conglomerates face business challenges. Thus, industry consolidation has become the trend. However, these add newer challenges in addition to the challenges caused due to changing market dynamics. The importance of giving a good customer experience has become the key to success. However this can be very challenging as the number of customers in oil and gas sector is huge as they are the basic necessities of most. Oil and Gas organizations store the customer data in their databases but this data is huge and thus, not easy to manage. However this can be very useful in understanding needs and preferences of customers such that company can improve their services to enhance customer satisfaction.  Many consumers today are exposed to the digital social media which is why the medium has become effective for marketing. Thus, oil and Gas Company can use the same to reach out to customers. This report explains how the organization can create a digital marketing plan for reaching customers online (Heimbigner & Krinhop, 2009).

Purpose of this project is to develop a digital marketing plan for an Oil & Gas company. Objectives of this project include:

• To develop the scope of the project
• Develop a Marketing plan for the company
• Develop a project management plan for managing Digital Marketing
• Develop schedule for the project of Digital Marketing
• Develop a project resource plan
• Develop a risk management plan

AMINA Inc. Is a London based Oil & Gas organization that employs 127,000 people and is spread in 37 countries. The company sells LPG, petroleum, lubricants and chemicals that it wants to promote digitally for which the marketing plan is being developed (CGI, 2004).

A project plan would cover all the activities that are carried out under digital marketing on this project. It will serve as a guide for the project team while they are executing the project. The project management would use the same for monitoring the progress of the project such that delays or other types of issues can be identified and issues causing those delays could be resolved (Tsui, 2011).

Activities that are in scope of the marketing project include:

• To identify the brand positioning and crate marketing message to communicate the same with the potential customer through the use of digital advertisement
• Identify various drivers, project objectives, functional requirements and critical success factors (Liberty Alliance, 2015).
• Develop a digital marketing plan for the chosen organization (Abbas, 2013).

Business environment of a company can be understood by using certain strategy models that identify environmental factors such as porter’s five forces that define the market forces faced by an organization while operating business and PESTLE analysis which helps in analysing the complete environment of the country company operates in.

The competitive forced company would face in the business can be explore using porters five forces model.

Force	Level of Impact	Impact
Bargaining power of suppliers	High	As the suppliers in this industry are limited in numbers and the prices are determined by these suppliers majorly such that the margins are to be adjusted by the sellers when selling to the end consumers, the bargaining power of supplier can identified  high
Bargaining Power of Buyers	Medium	Most buyers need petroleum as fuel for firing their vehicles as most popular vehicles come with the petrol driven engine. However, there are many companies pricing vehicles that make use of alternate fuel like gas so consumers have choice but they have to go with either irrespective of the price that they have to pay. They can but switch between different brands that are limited and thus, it can be said that they have some degree of power which is medium in level.
Threat from Substitutes	Medium	Biogas and CNG make the alternative to traditionally used fuels like petroleum. In recent years the importance of these alternate fuels has understood and thus, people are moving towards the use of alternate and sustainable fuels like gas. However many customers still take the option of petroleum for the sake of performance and initial investments. Thus, the threat from substitutes presents a moderate level of competition to the company.
Threat from New Entrants	Low	Establishing a production unit for oil and gas needs a significant investment as well as get set of approvals from government which can be very challenging for newer organizations planning to enter this field and thus, huge barriers stand their way. Established companies already have huge capacities a human capital that are difficult to further counter and thus, it can be said that the threat from new entrants is low.
Competitive Rivalry	High	There is apparently less or no differentiation between different brands selling oil and gas. Thus, switching costs are also low making the competitive rivalry strong as all of them have to fight in the same market.

(Porter, 2005)

Political: Political factors can affect an organization because it can affect the entire country as well as its relationships with other countries that create favourable or unfavourable environment for a company operating in a global space. UK is a capitalist country but is less liberal and thus, trades have agreements that can have significant impacts of the organizations as they would be controlled by the legal regulations. Moreover, the government has levied certain taxes against tariffs and export duties that can affect the oil and gas prices.

Risk Management

Economic: economic factors that affect a business in any country can include rates of interests, unemployment issues, inflation problems and several modes. The economic growth in UK is majorly dominated by the service and industrial sector while agriculture only makes a small contribution to the GDP. Service sector contributes to a significant 75% to GDP while production gives 23% of the contribution to GDP. 

Social: A set of cultural beliefs, customs, languages, and social practices that are followed by a group of people belonging to a country form the social landscape of the country.  In UK, four major languages are spoken including English, Welsh, Gaelic, and Scots. The country houses people from different religions such as Anglican, Catholic, Muslim, and Presbyterian.

Technological: UK is a leader in innovations and the enterprises in the country have won 23 Nobel prizes for innovation in life sciences. These companies put major investments in R&D and also receive tax benefits for doing R&D by the UK government.  The internet and social networking is also widely accepted and huge population of the country is using social media and thus, company can use the channel for an effective marketing to reach out to these consumers.

Legal: In UK, government provides support for business through subsidies and tax redemptions such that the laws are made flexible enough to smoothly operate a business in the country. However, at the same time, there are legislative compliance that the company has to deal with such as these defined in acts made for employee and customer protection or for competition.

Environmental: environmental factors are importance in oil and gas business and these include location, pollution, natural resources, and social concerns. For instance, oil exploitation required exploitation of natural resources that are limited in values and thus, should be used carefully. Air and water pollution is caused when consumers use petroleum operated vehicles.

The first step to stakeholder analyses identification of major stakeholders of a project and then the roles and responsibilities of each of these stakeholders are determined. An analysis would be performed on each role to understand what level of influence and impacts do these stakeholders would have when concerning the project. Based on this analysis, the stakeholders would be informed or communicate with throughout the project life cycle.

Oil & Gas organization – Sponsor	Sponsor would be approving and releasing funds for the execution of the marketing project. The Sponsor in this case would be the company itself that would have the processes for releasing funds that would managed by the finance manager of the company.
Marketing Managers	The marketing activities on the project would be managed by selected employees of the company who would be preparing and running the campaigns. AS these people would be responsible for writing messages that would sell the products and services of the project, their inputs and perspectives are very important. Further, they should be well informed about the company positing and solutions such that they can effectively communicate with the consumers through marketing and advertisements.
Project manager	Project Manager would plan, execute project and coordinate with team for competition of all marketing activities and to establish control over them.
Project team members	Team members of the project would be involved in performing actual marketing activities like campaign designing and execution. Thus, they would be involved throughout the project life cycle including in planning and executing

This marketing project would have standard constraints that any project would have of time, budget, scope and resources. The constraints and limitations on each of these areas would be:

• Budget: The project has to be completed within the budget of £100,000 such that no resource or activity should exceed this threshold unless in the cases of emergencies for which a 10% of contingency amount would be provided
• Time: The project has to be completed within 6 months’ time and any delays beyond that would not be allowed.
• Resources: The project resources would be selected from the internal staff itself based on their knowledge about the company, about content and about marketing as well as their skills in working with digital marketing media. As these resources are acquired from the internal staff, they would be limited in numbers
• Scope: The project scope has been defined clearly at the start of the project and the project manager must ensure that no activities that are beyond this scope are executed during the project(Roberts, 2011).

Resource Requirements

Risk Management process begins with identification of project risks and then an assessment if follows which is done on the basis of the probability of occurrence and impacts of each of these risks on the project. Based on the risk, its probability of occurrence and impact on project, some response plan would be developed and would be followed in case of any risks occurring on the project or are likely to occur with proactive action.

• Risks with high impact as well as probability of occurrence are critical and are best when avoided.
• Risks with low impact but high probability of occurrence are mitigated with some measures
• Risks with low impact as well as probability of occurrence may not harm the project and can be accepted if working on them takes major resources that are not justified
• Risks with high impact but low probability of occurrence can either be mitigated if that is caused by internal factors or transferred if the activity is an outsourced one such as internet service, hardware and software procured.

Figure 1: FF Analysis – Kurt Lewin

Force field analysis identifies factors that can create any major impacts on a project. These factors can either demand a change in project or can become obstacles to change. Some of the constraint of the project can be lack of user buy-in, insufficient understanding of stakeholder needs, and insufficiency of data causing difficulties in decision making.

Risks that are likely to occur are defined in the table below with the identification of person responsible and the contingency or response plan:

Risk	Impact	Probability	Response	Responsibility	Contingency Plan
Budget overrun caused by extra expenses	Medium	High	Mitigate	Project Manager	Get additional budget sanctioned if required
Schedule overrun because of various types of delays in deliverables	High	Medium	Mitigate	Project Manager	Assess and resolve issues causing delays
Deviations in the deliverables of the project	High	Medium	Mitigate	Service Provider	Understand and resolve causes of variations from deliverables defined.
Scope Creep caused by frequent changes made in the project scope after the project is started	High	Low	Mitigate	Project Manager	Understand the need for scope changes and assess related trade-offs based on which decisions may be taken for acceptance or rejection of the change demanded
The marketing is not executed as per the stakeholder requirement (Liu, 2013)	Medium	Medium	Mitigate	Service Provider	Weekly meetings must be held between the marketing manager and the project manager such that all requirements defined are checked for execution

The marketing project would utilize some major resources that include capital, Human resource team, IT infrastructure, and other information assets. These resources would have certain constraint and limitations on availability and thus, have to be managed properly for project execution in such that all the objectives of the project are met without having to ask for extra funds for project activities execution (WSDOT, 2015).

This factor includes the people who would be taking part in the project and they would be having following responsibilities:

Role	Responsibilities
Marketing Consultant	·         Study marketing requirement ·         Study and suggest marketing platforms and digital marketing strategies for company
Project Manager	·         Recruit and provide training to project team ·         Develop marketing and project plans ·         Study marketing strategies and evaluate them for selection ·         Maintain deliverables quality on project ·         Budget and schedule ·         Monitor and control activities required to complete project
Customer	·         Provide inputs during data gathering
Marketing Manager	·         Planning marketing and managing it ·         Coordinate with Project team for marketing ·         Monitor and approve marketing strategies
Subject-matter expert	·         Guide team on use of digital marketing strategies

This marketing project would need 90 days for completion.

For digital marketing project, the team would need hardware and software systems as well as web applications such as portal, social media applications, and customer database.

For the digital marketing project, the materials would be the information assets of the organization such as project plan, WBS, Schedule, and risk register.

The project is allotted a total budget of £100,000

RACI matrix can be used for identifying responsibilities and authorities of major project stakeholder as well as those who would need to be consulted or to be kept informed in case they are into directly involved in the execution of the project. The objective of this matrix is to assess and endure that those given responsibilities are also given authorities of execution or taking decisions up to certain level (Kloppenburg 2012).

	Project Manager	Customers	Marketing consultant	IT Manager	HR Manager
Budgeting	CI	RAC	I	I	I
Planning	C	RAC	I	I	I
Scheduling	C	RAC	I	CI	CI
requirements	I	RAC	CI	C I	CI
Marketing strategies	I A	RAC	CI	I	CI
Marketing	I	RAC	CI	I	CI
Project Management	A I	AC	I	I	I
Project Closure	A I	RAC	I	I	I

A project has to provide benefits more than the costs incurred to be able to select the current project ton marketing can bring in new sales and can be beneficial to the company in brining profits.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Total project budget can be determined after analysing cost of individual elements in a WBS using bottom up approach. This would include two types of costs – direct such as marketing costs and wages and indirect such as administrative expenses.

Total budget allotted for marketing project is £100,000 and its components include system hardware, applications, networking platforms, and company’s human resources (Nickel, Ross, & Rhodes, 2009).

Cash Flow Statement for April 2017
Cash Flow – Sales Cash Flows – payments Staff Salaries	£110,000 £53,000 (£70,000) (£30,000)
Cash Flow – finance Capital Investment	£110,000
Net cash increase	£163,000

The expected ROI from this project would be £73,000 which makes the 53% of investment.

Breakeven can be achieved within two years of its operations

Some non-financial benefits would also be gained from marketing:

• Strong digital branding of the company
• Data analysis would deliver useful consumer insights
• Company can communicate with the customers directly

WBS	Task Name
1	Communication Management plan
1.1	Requirement analysis
1.1.1	Identify marketing channels
1.1.2	Prepare marketing strategies
1.1.3	Prepare marketing messages
1.2	Marketing channels
1.2.1	Marketing channel exploration
1.2.1.1	Facebook
1.2.1.2	Twitter
1.2.1.3	LinkedIn
1.2.2	Blogs
1.2.2.1	Ads websites
1.2.2.2	Other websites
1.2.3	Selection marketing channel
1.3	Marketing
1.3.1	Prepare marketing plan
1.3.2	Execute marketing plan
1.4	Analytics
1.4.1	Analyse marketing campaign performance
1.4.2	Prepare decisions for marketing performance
1.4.3	Update marketing campaigns
1.5	Project closure

The project activities need to be controlled in such a way that they do not exceed the budget or add delays beyond certain threshold level. Thus, project manager would keep monitoring the activities and compare them with the project plan to identify if there are any deviations or delays such that actions can be immediately taken for resolution. A progress review may be conducted by the project manager after completion of every project milestones (Balestrero, 2006). Tools like control bar and Gantt chart can be very useful in project monitoring and control (Larson & Gray, 2007).

Different types of meeting that would be conducted between the project team or project manager and the client are illustrated in the table below:

Meeting	Purpose	Frequency of meeting	Meeting Owner	Attendees
Meeting  for Initiation  of the  Project	Requirement gathering	Before stating the project	Project Manager	Marketing consultant marketing team
Project Progress meetings	Progress report includes description of issues and delays as well as identified solutions	Weekly	Marketing Consultant	Marketers
Review Meeting	Project progress	Monthly	Project Manager	Marketing Consultant
Client Meetings	Progress report	Monthly	Project Sponsor	Project Manager
Emergency Meetings	Major issues	Whenever required	Project Manager	marketing Consultant
Project Closure	Handover  deliverables to the customer (STECHYSHYN, 2015)	After project completion	Project Manager Client	Marketing Consultant

Report Matter	Description	Frequency	Owner	Report to
Project progress	Milestone delays, issues, and deviations from the plan	Monthly	Project Manager	Project Sponsor
Management Issues	People related issues Management related issues Technical issues	Weekly	Team  Head	Project Manager
Risk Report	Risk register Risk response plan Contingency plan	Monthly	Project Manager	Top Management

A project can only be closed after all the deliverable is accepted by the client and the next step would be to prepare a closure report along with all the closure documentation which would be presented to the sponsor for final approval.

The project report is reviewed by the Project steering committee on the basis of following questions –

• Does the project closure report contain all information required for acceptance?
• Is the project information correct and reliable?
• Do we have the next action identified?
• Does the report clarify roles and responsibilities of team?
• Are there any governance aspects important for the project?
• Is the entire project deliverables met?

Conclusions

This project report was written for developing a digital marketing plan for an oil and gas organization called Amina Inc. It included a detailed WBS that outlined all the project activities, communication management plan, budget, and risk management planning, monitoring and control procedures.

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